tag: MCU

Energy harvesting is gaining traction with a surge in ultra-low-power IoT applications, ranging from inventory tracking, wearables and drones, to vibration sensors for motors in industrial settings.
The idea that machines could run without batteries—or that energy could be harvested either from motion or ambient sound waves or chemical reactions to augment battery power—has been in the w... » read more

The ARM Cortex-M family now has six processors. In this paper, we compare the features of various Cortex-M processors and highlight considerations for selecting the correct processor for your
application. The paper includes detailed comparisons of the Cortex-M instruction sets and advanced interrupt capabilities, along with system-level features, debug and trace features, and performance compa... » read more

October 19, 2004 was a date like any other, and will probably not mean much to most people. However, if you are part of the Embedded community, that precise date was transformational for the microcontroller (MCU) industry. It was the day that ARM announced the first Cortex-M processor, bringing the advantages of a common architecture to the microcontroller market.
Embedded developers quickly... » read more

A revolution is occurring under the hoods of vehicles today, as the automotive industry continues to add sophistication via electronics to vehicles at a pace never seen before. But because of the automotive ecosystem’s tiered structure, system companies, IP and embedded software developers and tools vendors must invest more just to participate.
Robert Bates, chief safety officer in [getent... » read more

Microcontrollers are becoming more complex, more powerful, and significantly more useful, but those improvements come with strings attached.
While it's relatively straightforward to develop multi-core microcontroller (MCU) hardware with advanced power management features, it's much more difficult to write software for these chips because memory is limited. CPUs can use on-chip memory such as... » read more

As the semiconductor industry heads into the second half of 2016, it’s time to take the pulse of the IC sector.
Based on the current signs, there’s a faint pulse, if that. Simply put, the IC market has been in the doldrums in the first half of 2016. And it looks sluggish heading into the second half.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. At the beginning of this year, many predicte... » read more

The optimal number of processor cores in chip designs is becoming less obvious, in part due to new design and architectural options that make it harder to draw clear comparisons, and in part because just throwing more cores at a problem does not guarantee better performance.
This is hardly a new problem, but it does have a sizable list of new permutations and variables—right-sized heteroge... » read more

Acquisitions
Synopsys acquired Australia's Goanna Software, a security company focused on static code analysis tools for improving code quality. Synopsys said the acquisition is part of its strategy to improve software sign-off, but the acquisition also expands Synopsys' presence in Australia and the Asia/Pacific region. Terms of the deal were not made public. Synopsys has been steadily build... » read more